Town Meeting budget fixes announced
Published on September 22nd, 2004
STONEHAM, MA - Unveiling his proposed FY05 budget adjustments at Tuesday night’s summit meeting, Town Administrator Ron Florino argued in favor of expending an additional $533,000 at October’s Town Meeting.
According to Florino, while his conservative plan falls far short of the nearly $1 million in requested departmental expenditures for this year’s budget, the town needs to be wary of any costs that would add to a growing deficit in FY06.
“I see tough times ahead for another year or two,” Florino predicted. “Trying to be more real with the numbers, I hope everybody can understand that we need to tighten our belts and hold out for this year.”
Specifically, Florino’s plan would fall under two categories, one that would address several accounting errors and spending oversights, and another that would increase funding to the town’s safety departments and school system.
As town officials made a commitment to man the streets with additional traffic directors at August’s Special Town Meeting — a safety need that Florino considers in the joint interests of both the municipal and school sectors — $85,000 would be slated towards the safety department.
Funding 15 of the positions year round, the town administrator saw no way around the expenditure as he observed school-aged children traveling to school over the past month.
“This is a real issue. It’s a safety issue, and I think we were committed to this cost,” said Florino to the gathering of Selectmen, Finance Board members and School Committee representatives.
Addressing another of the town’s dire safety needs, Florino also hopes that the Selectmen and Finance Board will back his plan to fund the police and fire department overtime budgets with an additional $100,000.
Although the Selectmen had informally committed to spending a combined $250,000 on the overtime accounts as they pieced together the FY05 budget last spring, Florino argued the town only had the funding to reinstate $50,000 to each department.
“I felt it necessary to do this with their overtime budgets basically all but spent,” explained Florino. “I told [the fire chief] that he could get $50,000, but that would have to do for the rest of the year.”
Holding to the traditional understanding that the town and school’s would share both the burden of deficits and the arrival of unexpected windfalls, the Town Administrator would allot $100,000 in revenues to the school department.
“The approach I tried to take in this is that we went through the budget process taking equal cuts. And anything we spend should be split equally as well,” Florino said.
Attempting to convince the audience of officials that the schools desperately needed the funds, Stoneham Superintendent Dr. Joseph Connelly commented that while the additional monies paled in comparison to the multi-million dollar hit the school system suffered in FY05, the $100,000 would bolster the devastated elementary schools’ budgets.
“We have a situation now where the loss of 30 positions has really caused some conditions to change. And bringing back that $100,000 will have some major impacts on the schools. It doesn’t sound like a lot [of money], but this year it’s a critical need,” Connelly said.
According to Connelly, while it’s too late in the year to restore teachers in the core disciplines, the windfall would allow the restoration of elementary arts teachers, teaching aides, and library media — returning valuable planning time to grade-level teachers.
With the school system also still enduring both vocal and whispered criticisms from citizens in the aftermath of June’s failed override vote, Connelly also urged the town officials to help quell popular rumors that the school department was “finding money buried in their budget.”
According to the Superintendent, while the school had indeed restored valuable positions back into the budget, the funding for those positions came from the school committee’s close tracking of changes in their budget. So in effect, argued Connelly, the schools were being chastised for addressing their needs through the responsible scrutiny of potential grants, additional state funds, and teachers’ changing unemployment status.
“People say things along the line that, ‘you’re still finding money’. What I’m trying to emphasize is that our budget hasn’t increased one penny. We’re just reallocating funds we already have,” Connelly said. “That wasn’t finding money, that wasn’t buried funds, that was good management of our budget.”
Of the remaining $248,000 Florino proposes placing into the budget, $143,000 would fund an accounting error in the fire department’s personnel budget, $75,000 would fund the zero-funded capital and reserve accounts, and $30,000 would fund other departmental adjustments.
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